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As collectors, we all face the inevitable scenario of duplicates. Some of us insist on keeping everything just in case something happens to the other one, but most of sell or trade off one of the others. I don't know about the rest of you, but I scrutinize both pieces and first check for any variations; assuming they're both the same, I keep the higher quality one and sell the lesser one. However, with my recent acquisition of a near mint boxed Power Pad, I've come to a serious dilemma. See, the problem is that I already have a boxed Power Pad, though the box is in poor condition.
So now, you're probably wondering what the dilemma is. Keep the near mint one and sell the crappy one, case closed. But here's the kicker; the poor condition is the one from my childhood, yep the same Power Pad little 3 year old NES_Rules used to play World Class Track Meet on, also the same pad I learned that you can "run" with your hands a hell of a lot faster than you can with your feet.
So, this week's dilemma is: what to keep, the treasured childhood memory or the near mint treasure that looks a lot nicer on the shelf. So, members of RF Generation, which would YOU keep? Of course, one could just keep both, but for the sake of argument, let's say you can only keep one.
Ed Note: Got to love logical's fervor. -TJSo... Our great site rfgeneration.com has this really awesome thing called a
chat room. And it's just that, AWESOME! I know that personally, I've had some great times in the chat room, and I can assure you all that others have too.
You got a question but don't want to wait for a reply to your post? Then you could go over to the chat and ask. you would get an answer. Bar none. At least, that's how it used to be...
The chat here at rfgeneration has become a ghost town, a miserable excuse for the BEST GAME SITE EVER! Malygris is almost always in there, and I frequently stop by. So do others. But if you're the only one in a chat room, don't you normally leave? Of course you do. It's down right boring.
That's why I am blogging to my fellow rfgen'ers, so that we can revive the chat, make it lively again. At least, I hope thats what everyone gets out of this...
The chat is awesome, and I don't like seeing it go to waste. So, hop on over to the rfgeneration chat room, and get CHATTING!
Goodwill. A great store and friend to some, while an evil enemy to others. What makes Goodwill 'good', or 'bad', or even 'ugly'? Well, this rant is here to tell you!
The GOOD:
You can find stuff! It always helps to be able to find stuff in the wild. And, Goodwill has a strange habit of ripping themselves off. But sometimes... Well, that leads into...
The BAD:
Sometimes, they overprice! And I mean A LOT! Come on! 4 Bucks for a cib Genesis Sports game?! Ah well... (And then, of course you buy it.) Then comes...
The UGLY:
In a large portion of Goodwills, organization is a
huge problem. There are things sterewn acrossed the floor, and... WHAT IS DRIPPING FROM THE CEILING?!!?!? I digress. Goodwill is not, how I say, the cleanest place on earth.
In conclusion, personally, I feel that Goodwill offers a great opportunity to find some games on your lunch break or after school one day. The good is roughly equal to the bad, so I recommend anyone who has the time and the energy to leaf through piles of VHS tapes and books. THUMBS UP!
Why do I bother anymore? Enjoy your week of summer shovelware everyone!
| Playstation 3 | Xbox 360 | Nintendo Wii |
•
Monster Madness: Grave Danger | ... | •Little League World Series
•King of Clubs
•Summer Athletics |
| PSP | Nintendo DS | Playstation 2 |
| ... | •The Cheetah Girls: Passport to Stardom
•GRID
•Little League World Series
•Professor Brainium
•Quick Yoga Training
•Rock Blast | •B-Boy
•Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour |
Asking me to pick a game to get out of those is like forcing me to stab myself in the eye with a rusty knife, so I'm going to highlight Braid, this week's new Xbox Live Arcade game, and recipient of the 2006 Independent Games Festival award for Innovation In Design. The game is a puzzle platformer that features the ability to "rewind" your actions in order to help solve puzzles and correct your mistakes. However, rewinding creates the puzzles. For example, there are objects in the levels that cannot be rewound, alternate realities, and more. I have never played the game, but judging by the videos and various interviews with the game's designer, Jonathan Blow, this is going to be an incredible game. It comes out on XBLA this week and on PC sometime later this year.
Here's a link to the official website of the game:
http://www.braid-game.com/
Look at that box art.
Damn. You know, most people wish for their box art to look somewhere close to what the game is like, but instead, the original
Mega Man's box art is
that. To me, it looks like the artist or marketing team were on an acid trip while going over / creating that box art, and that is why we have
that. Certainly, some creative liberties were taken with that box art.
Anyways, I am not writing this article to talk about
that, but instead
this. Capcom has finally realized that they can make a lot of easy money by rereleasing
Mega Man for the Virtual Console. You know, as a kid, Mario was great and all, but at least for me Mega Man stole the show. I loved that series, and well,
Mega Man 2 is a masterpiece. I bet there are a lot of other people who hold a similar nostalgic value for Mega Man.
Well, fortunately for people like myself, Capcom has decided to start the hype train for the release of
Mega Man 9, the game that is quite possibly going to be the hardest Mega Man of all time, if what they said is to be believed. All I know is that I want the game, and to further make me want the game, Capcom is releasing
Mega Man for the Virtual Console, tomorrow. That's right, tomorrow kids, at least stateside. And even better news for me,
Mega Man 2 is coming out for the Virtual Console in early September.
Let the hype train roll, Capcom, I bet you'll see some healthy sales with those two releases, as well as the release of
Mega Man 9.
The Blue Bomber is coming to Virtual Console [Dtoid]
Saturday was an awesome day of sales, there was simply too many to get to them all so we had to hurry at each one to get to as many as we could. In total, we drove 50 miles of garage saling. But it was worth the $8 in gas for all the stuff we got. The very first house we stopped at had this stuff:
The Captain N and the Double Dragon next to it are still sealed. Everything was marked $1 each, I got my normal 6 for $5.
It was kind of funny getting that stuff, the guy had boxes of VHS tapes, PC games (mostly edutainment), and books. I just happened to see the Sonic R and then the Battletoads VHS so I dug a little deeper and kept pulling out the video game related VHS tapes. Oddly enough though, he didn't have any other video games.
There was a neighborhood sale in the same area but they had one a few weeks ago and it was expensive junk then so this week it was 1/2 off junk. We didn't even stop at the majority of them.
It was a while before I got anything else, but it was worth the wait. For $2:
There's actually 3 copies of Sewer Shark, I have no idea why though. The other game in the jewel case is Sherlock Holmes: consulting detective vol. II. The Genesis games are all CIB and I have no idea what that USB cord is for. I paid asking price on that one. The lady was nice and friendly so I didn't feel like ripping her off more than she already was.
We went to another sale that I knew we have been to before (had nothing the last time) but we were already there so I went up to it anyway and came back with these:
Nothing amazing, but it was only $2 for it all.
Next up was a huge neighborhood sale, two streets long and nearly every house was participating. Of course a lot of it was junk but I managed to find a couple treasures.
These were actually from two different houses. Both are factory sealed although the GBA game is missing some of it's shrink-wrap. I paid the asking price on Trouballs at $1, I offered $1 for the other, we settled on $1.50. Once I got home and peeled off the Trouballs price sticker there was a $0.75 sticker under the $1 sticker. Wish I had known that before, I would have peeled off the $1 sticker.
Also from that neighborhood sale:
Paid asking price of $1 each.
At one of the houses, as we walk up to the garage the woman asks "are you here for the garage sale" we tell her yes, expecting her to say it was closed. But she said that everything in a large pile was free and there was more at the curb. So I went and got the truck and we filled it up with boxes and bags of kids toys. Some of it will go to my niece but we'll probably sell the rest to a guy at the flea market for a few bucks. There was a couple things in there for me as well. The video game related stuff:
Most of the toys are circa 2002 but the Luigi on the cloud is from 1989.
Unfortunately, half way through this neighborhood sale, my mom called us. We had to take some stuff to a golf course for an outing we were having. So we stopped and left my dad's truck (which was pre-packed the night before) there and we continued our expedition.
On the way back to the sales, there was a small unadvertised yard sale but it didn't look like much so my dad wanted to just drive by, and I agreed until I saw a small black fabric case on the table and some cords hanging down. I know I've seen N64 system/game cases before and I just had a hunch that that was what this was. So I backed up to the sale and took a look. The cords turned out to be an old walkman and the case wasn't an N64 one. I was so disappointed that it didn't say N64 on it, I almost didn't see "Sega Game Gear" embroidered onto it. I asked the price, he said $10, that's what I paid.
The games:
T2: the arcade game
the lion king
dynamite headdy
Ecco the Dolphin
Batman Returns
Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude
Pac-Man
RoboCop versus Terminator
Star Wars
Taz-Mania
Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Sonic and Tails
Fatal Fury Special
IN noN video game related finds, I got some other goodies too.
For $1 I got this sweet trench coat:
Should be perfect if deer hunting season is as rainy as it was last season.
For $2.50 I got this sizeable box of miscellaneous wires:
She was asking $3, I offered $2, we settled on $2.50. I still have to go through it all. There's a lot of composite cables (some high end gold plated ones too), coax cables, and speaker wire.
CDs were from a couple different sales but were all $1 each.
And for $0.50 I got this antique coax switcher.
Will be perfect for my Genesis and 2600, no more unplugging and switching for me.
The flea market today wasn't spectacular but better than it has been in recent weeks. I'm seeing more and more vendors specializing in overpriced classic games though.
I did manage to get this off a woman for $4:
When I asked the price she whispered $4 and I thought she said $40 but when I asked her to repeat it, I heard her say $4, so I bought it for that. I was prepared to pay $5 for it though. The box is in excellent condition with just minor shelf wear and the pad itself is like new. Now I have to decide if I should keep this one or the one from my childhood which is not as nice condition. She also had what appeared to be a CIB Genesis 2 Core System, but it was $20 and boxed Genesis systems seem to be everywhere.
A few spots away was a guy with a bunch of random stuff but I spotted a PS1 with a couple games, he said $25 for it, I passed on it. But then I saw Caveman Games for the NES sticking out of a box, so I looked inside to see a pair of Genesis systems, a tangle of wires, and a few games. He said the whole box was $2, I didn't even bother looking to see what all the games were.
I guess this weekend was good enough to make up for the deplorable one last weekend. There wasn't anything one thing that was spectacular, but it was all priced very good and I managed to fill in a few holes in my collection so I guess it was a successful treasure hunt.
The Final Fantasy series is one of the longest game series out there. What started as a failing company's "Final" Fantasy, ended up as one of the most succesful franchises of all time, with 12 parts in the main series and dozens of remakes and spin-offs.
Final Fantasy XII (2006) is the second game of the main series on the PS2, after Final Fantasy X (2001) and it's semi spin-off Final Fantasy X-2 (2003).
Final Fantasy XII (FF12) takes place in the world of Ivalice, where two major kingdoms, Rosaria and Arcadia are at war. Our main character Vaan comes from the smaller kingdom Dalmasca, trapped between the two fighting nations. He lives in Rabanastre, capital of Dalmasca, with his friend Penelo, and dreams of one day becoming a sky pirate.
FF12 starts with a small prequel (which serves the function of tutorial), where we meet Reks, the two year older brother of Vaan, who gets murdered in a fight with Aradia. We also meet Bash, captain of the Dalmascan army, who prevents his king from signing a treaty, by murdering him. Because of his action, Dalmasca doesn't become part of the Arcadian empire and a resiliance rises against the opressing nation.
From here, the story continues and it doesn't take long until you meet (in typical FF style) the other characters of your party.
A couple of negative remarkes should be made about this story:
1) The main character Vaan is a pretty ordinary guy who doesn't seem to influence the story all that much. Balthier (and to a lesser extend: Ashe), a member of your party, seems to be making the decisions when it comes to what to do next, which makes me wonder why you don't view the story more out of his perspective.
2) Although the voice acting is fine (with some characters having a refreshing non-American accent) a lot of the sentences spoken, are not. Lots of the "higher" class character speak as if they just walked out of a Shakespear play. This makes the story sometimes hard to follow, especially in cut-scenes where text is being said rather fast. This maybe fun for those who major in english, but for others (and those whose first language isn't english) this can be a problem.
Anyway, enough about the story, let's talk gameplay. For FF12, Square dared to innovate. Whether you like this or not, that's up to you to decide, but certain things have pretty radically changed.
Most noticably: The random encounter, turn-based battle system is gone. Now, you can simply see your enemies walk in the same environment as you, and even avoid them if you don't feel like fighting. The battle system changed aswell. What Square calls the "Active Dimension Battle" (ADB) is a real-time battle system in which your characters and the enemies can freely move. Blue and Red curved lines indicate which char/enemy is atacking another. Because the battle is in real-time, the gameplay is much faster (a good thing) but can get pretty hectic with lots of enemies on the screen or during a boss battle (a bad thing).
Another new addition to FF12 is the gambit system. Gambits are commands your characters (both the character you're controlling and the 2 others) will execute under certain conditions.
Things like "Attack enemy who is HP critical" to "Throw elexir on character with MP>10%". The order in which you place these in the Gambit screen will mark the importance of each action, the highest placed gambit being the most important. Lots of different options make this an interesting system to experiment with, aswell as making the battles more enjoyable; because the player doesn't have to select each action manually.
The "License Board" serves the same function as the "Sphere Grid" in FF10, although less complicated. License Points are required to activate licenses, which you gain next to experience in battle. It's basically a large chess board, with magic spells, augments, armor and weapons on all spots. This board controls what the characters can do/wear, because you can only activate a license that borders a license your character has already learned. In the first 20 (or so) hours of the game, it's important not to waste your License Points, so your characters can wear the latest armor, use the latest spells, etc. So if you want to use the spell "Fira" with a character, you have to activate the corresponding license on the board, aswell as buy the spell in a magic shop. This seems rather complicated, but works pretty smoothly.
A bad thing however is that it's much too easy to complete the License Board. With a character at level 50, he/she will probably have almost the entire License Board activated, which makes all characters identical and renders character tactics completely useless.
Graphics of this game are very good for a PS2 game, with the addition of a fully 3D world where you can control the camera in, something that makes the game much more accesible, and maybe even more mainstream. Also new is that non-playable-characters (NPCs) who have something to say are indicated with a text-balloon above their heads, making it unnecessary to try and talk to each NPC in an area. I have the feeling the amount of CGI has gone down alot compared to FF10, but I might be wrong.
As I said earlier, the voicework for the main characters is done well, apart from the lip-sync being wrong alot, which is a common problem when dubbing a Japanese game.
Music in this game has the typical FF-atmosphere to it, but is composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, instead of Nobuo Uematsu. Don't let that scare you though, because Sakimoto is also responsible for the music of Final Fantasy Tactics (1997) and Vagrant Story (2000) to name a few.
As always, FF12 is filled with side quests and little things you can busy yourself with apart from the main story such as: going on Hunts or finding Unique (rare) monsters.
If you'd like to skip these completely, it'll still take 50-60 hours to finish the game, depending on how much you try to rush your way through it. Doing all sidequests too will keep you busy for atleast 120 hours. In other words, this game is good value for the money.
I can conclude with saying I enjoyed playing this game, despite of the couple faults I named, and think anyone who likes RPG's should get it, aswell as those looking for a game that'll keep them busy for a longer time.
9.1/10PS: I realise now this is no longer a "little" review, but it's hard to review a game like FF12 in only a couple of lines
As you can tell, the big game this week is of course Madden NFL 09 for all systems (
Perhaps football isn't your thing and you would rather play a more traditional game. Well, this week has plenty to offer you. First up on the list is Bangai-O Spirits, the latest from fan-favorite developer, Treasure. As you may have guessed, Bangai-O Spirits is a sequel to the cult classic N64/Dreamcast shooter Bangai-O. If you haven't played the original, the game is a free-roaming, multidirectional 2D shooter. The DS version promises to retain the spirit of the original, including the insane number of bullets on screen at once. What's neat about Spirits is that the levels have been designed around co-op, so you can jump in with up to 3 other people and play the game together. However, the coolest feature about the game is that it includes a level editor which allows you to build your own levels and share them with your friends. However, since Treasure is a quirky developer, they had to go about sharing them in the most bizarre way possible. The created level is encoded as a modem-like sound that is played over your DS speakers and transferred to your friend’s system using the microphone. The sound can also be output over the DS headphone jack and recorded on your computer to share with the world in MP3 format or over YouTube. This feature will not only work with levels, but you can also send high scores and replay videos. Pointless? Sure, but at least you don't have to deal with friend codes. Awesome? Totally.
But there's more! This week also sees the release of the long-awaited Bionic Commando Rearmed on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and PC (via Steam, Direct2Drive, and other digital distribution platforms). Rearmed is a remake of the NES classic which features the same great gameplay as the original, but with new 2.5D HD graphics, new areas, online leaderboards, and other features. The game does not have any Nazi references as seen in the original Japanese game, but the voice acting and script of the game does make fun of the fact that it's censored. People buying it on the PS3 will also be able to play the game on their PSP using the remote play feature, and can also look forward to trophy support in a future patch for the game. The game will cost $10 on both XBLA and PSN, while it's going to be $15 on PC.
Finally this week, the latest episodic series from one of my favorite developers, Telltale Games, begins. The series is Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, based on the popular web toon 
Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, well, that’s at least what they say. To me imitation could be a good thing, or, in a market where being unique can lead to being hugely popular and subsequent huge profit margins, a very bad thing. Look for example at Apple. No one is really like Apple in what they do and what they offer. Apple is the trendy tech company, and pending the outcome of a lawsuit, they either will be comfortably the trendy tech company for years to come, or they could see their profit margins erode as the Mac OS is opened up to other hardware manufacturers. Certainly could throw a wrench into things, that’s for sure.
Developer MOSS has announced (again?) that the arcade hit, Raiden IV, will be arriving on the Xbox 360 this fall. It is slated for a September 11 release and should be supercharged with two extra levels. DLC offerings will take the Ace Combat 6 route where you can buy more ships with different weapon selections and capabilities. A much anticipated feature is the ability to save and share replays of successful runs. Additional bells and whistles include the ability to play in TATE mode (sideways), world rankings, and stunning 3D backgrounds made possible by this next-gen system. Also, a soundtrack CD will be bundled with the game for a limited time. The 360 soundtrack will include all the original arcade music plus extras and some remixes.
Lego Rock Raiders is a 1999 PC game based on the popular Rock Raiders franchise. The game is aimed at children who like the actual Rock Raiders Lego but can also entertain teenagers or adults looking for a way to spend a couple of hours.